Monday, May 12, 2008

1. Core obviously doesn't have a GUI, so your dcpromo wizard is gone. The easiest way to circumvent this is by using an unattended file. See: http://www.petri.co.il/creating-unattend-installation-file-dcpromo-windows-server-2008.htm

2. Set all interfaces to static addresses (IPv6 included! P.S. Stay tuned for a bunch of IPv6 setup info) using the netsh command. http://www.petri.co.il/configuring-windows-server-2008-networking-settings.htm and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb878102.aspx

Here's a big catch that really disappointed me: when creating an unattend.txt file for dcpromo purposes, you CANNOT use an already existing DC! What the hell?! It would stand to reason that the smartest approach Msft could take on this would be to allow you to create a file from a already installed and tweaked server, but as it stands that's not possible. The only chance you get to create an unattend.txt file is right at the end of the initial DCPromo. That being said, even if you aren't sure about your DCPromo setup on a non-core machine, utilize the "Export Settings" anyhow. At least then you'll have a baseline to start from and you won't have to do the whole thing from scratch like me. Yuck.

Monday, May 5, 2008

So, after the Microsoft "Heroes Happen Here" launch event, I'm playing around with my copies of software. I've got all new hardware for a dedicated HyperV machine as my main lab setup and I'm experimenting with setting up a new infrastructure with PKI, IPSec, AD Services, Exchange, etc.

Here are some Hyper-V specific notes:

- Emulated hosts are SLOW. Holy cow! I can't believe how slow hosts are on this platform before installing the Integration Services (VMware addons equiv.) It is BY FAR slower than VMWare ESX, VMWare Server, or Virtual Server 2005R2 without the addons. After installation the performance is great, but it took me hours to get a 2003 host setup and patched before that installation, since the minimum requirements are somewhat steep for the guest OS to support the IS software. This is disappointing.

- Most annoying "quirk" sofar: When you create a fixed size disk, which is what I prefer to do for performance reasons, all related activity on that set of drives STOPS. Guests that rely on that drive set will nearly lock up until the completion of the disk is completed. This is byfar the most annoying thing I've seen sofar. It's not a low performance I/O setup I've got here; An adaptec 3405 SAS/SATA RAID card with 4x WD 5000KCS drives in a RAID 5EE array. I realize it's not enterprise class, but it should be well enough to do two things at once. The creation routine for the fixed disk is far to agressive with I/O in my opinion.

This whole post is a touch light on details. I'll add more later.

Edit: Add..

Another annoying quirk; Since the addons that shipped with Win2k8 were a beta, the RC0 addons are not fully compatible. Because of that, they don't work until you manually update them with this update: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDD94DDA-9D31-4E6D-88A0-1939DE3E9898&displaylang=en

This is probably the 1 millionth blog opened with the title "hello world". I'm super creative like that.

I plan on using this space as a sounding board for technologies I'm working with, including notes and "gotchas" in the process. My sole purpose is to "give back" to the blogging "community" that has been so helpful in my pursuit of eventual free time through completed work. As you can see, as well, I am also here to glorify the "quote".

A small bit about me: I'm currently an Apps Engineer for one of the largest banks in the world, (Just a touch paranoid about giving out my employer details on a blog) and I work mainly with middle tier software solutions to facilitate relatively simple technical solutions for relatively complex business problems. If you like you can check out my LinkedIn profile for more details: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tobymeyer

I also help out at TopDogPC (www.topdogpc.com) in my spare time, a local St. Paul based network services company. They specialize in Managed Services and business solutions (voip, exchange, etc.) for small to medium size companies.

I have been a "Microsoft guy" the majority of my life, (Windows, IIS, SQL, Exchange, Biztalk) but I'm by no means an evangelist. I sway in that direction when I evaluate solutions simply because it's where I have the most experience, but I've also engineered end to end solutions using alternative solutions. ( Linux, Websphere, Apache, etc.) To entertain myself I maintain a mach network @ home, and most of the things I'll probably blog about will be my experience working with the technologies I experiment with there. To add some credibility to that statement by the way, substute "home" with "lab".